Tag Archives: Daishin Morgan

Listening for the silence

Waiting is a deep acceptance of the moment as such, even when we are actively practicing meditative inquiry. Part of Son [Korean Zen] involves asking, “What is this?” of our experience, but without any interest in an answer. We’re not waiting for something, we’re just waiting. We realize that our longing for an answer undermines the authenticity of the questioning itself. Can we be satisfied just to rest in this questioning, but in a deeply focused and embodied way? Can we wait without any expectations?

Going hand in hand with this waiting is also a quality of listening. Rather than just listening more attentively to the crows in the trees, the noises in the room, or the quiet hush of silence, think of listening as a metaphor for meditation…

With listening, rather than narrowing your attention on a particular sound “out there,” you open yourself up to allow the sound to enter you. The internal posture you assume is not that of a detached observer looking out onto something, but rather a completely vulnerable and open attention that allows sounds to stream into you from every direction. That’s a very different inner stance. Your physical posture might be the same, but your mental posture is the opposite to that of looking at something.

Stephen Batchelor, Tricycle Magazine March 2020

Listening has become a favourite metaphor for me, too; though it’s more than a metaphor, really. To be aware of sound in meditation, as with physical sensation, is an opening of oneself to what is coming to be, quite simply. There is no anxious reaching for understanding, nor any attempt to impose any kind of religious or psychological interpretation on what is perceived.

Listening, though, is also an inward discipline – an openness to quiet inklings that otherwise are drowned out by the usual internal chatter. It begins, sometimes, with an unsought willingness to hear the call to the contemplative life in the first place:

To know such a call is to feel its insistence. Having felt it, one can hide by running to distractions of one kind or another, but whenever there is a pause in the business of life, it is there awaiting our response. This call is the greatest blessing imaginable, and it sometimes feels like torture. Even though it makes so many demands, we would be bereft without it.

Daishin Morgan, Buddha Recognizes Buddha

But like so many things in this life, it is never simply a stage we pass through. The call is ever present, always renewed. It is always the same; and different, sometimes radically different, each time. If we are listening, we will find ourselves called deeper into the wilderness, away from the well-trodden places we may have become used to. For me, it has, as I said yesterday, led increasingly to quiet, and away from organised religion altogether.

Listening has become a listening for the silence that underlies audible sounds, beneath the birdsong and the distant clatter of the Bristol train, beneath the background hush of the breeze in the leaves. The silence holds the sound, infinitely precious and detailed, as the open ground itself holds all that comes to be, all its loveliness and horror, all its endless opportunities for being loved.

Seamarks

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The Buddha’s teaching was focussed on the one purpose of showing how to find the end of suffering. He identified the cause of suffering as the afflictions of ignorance and desire and set out a path leading to liberation from these afflictions. That path begins with the recognition of the need to train oneself. This arises from an inner prompting and an observation of how suffering touches everyone, that all things are impermanent and there is nothing substantial in which we can find true refuge. Next comes the need for an ethical life for ourselves so that we can know peace and tranquillity, and to help others, since through sympathetic understanding we realize that others suffer in the same way as we do.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

The Buddha did not found a religion – he taught a way of contemplation, a way out of the confusion and panic that so much of human life seems to consist in, where we know that even the pleasures and satisfactions we seek so desperately are spoilt by our fear of losing them even in the instant they are grasped.

The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by misreading our senses and interpreting the data in a manner that suggests an “I”. It seems as though stuff happens to “me”. I have the impression of being one thing and the world around me another thing. I am drawn to seek pleasure and avoid pain. This basic motivation has its roots in the feeling of an “I” set against the world…

In questioning the basic assumption that this “I” is real and permanent, Buddhism teaches that the “I” we treasure has no independent existence of its own and cannot exist without everything else being the way that it is. All of existence is interdependent so to view the “I” as a separate thing is an illusion.

Morgan, ibid.

In these realisations there are no gods or demons, and no angels or prophets either. The Buddha taught simply, “Verify for yourself whether what I teach corresponds with the truth…”

Philosophical Taoism is not a religion either. Neither in Laozi nor in Zhuangzi can we find a pattern of worship or a dogma laid down, though there are plenty of references to the gods of traditional Chinese folk religion. It is more an approach to metaphysics than a faith, and its ideal is the person of wisdom and understanding rather than devotion.

In the thousands of years these teachings have been knocking around human history, they have accrued countless superstitions and religious structures and rituals; but none of these is more than tradition and observance. The central philosophy, and its roots in practice, may evolve; but they remain praxis, not doctrine.

It seems to me that contemporary, largely humanist, understandings of contemplative spirituality are a vital next step in being able to “verify for [ourselves]”. Writers like Tara Brach, Sam Harris, Toni Bernhard and Susan Blackmore likewise are not looking for followers, but trying to pass on the fruit of their own experience. Each generation seems to find its own contemplative language, and each of us has our own small measure of responsibility in carrying that forward; in sharing, directly or indirectly, some of the seamarks we have noticed on our own voyages. No one else can do it for us…

Contemplative Reading

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I was at a loss to think how to title this blog post. If you Google “spiritual reading” you will immediately be flooded with psychic suggestions, tarot divinations, horoscopes and astrology, interspersed with the occasional Catholic site recommending “reading [the] lives of saints, writings of Doctors and the Fathers of the Church, theological works written by holy people, and doctrinal writings of Church authorities.” None of these are what I was looking for, you may be pleased to know.

If you are a member of a monastic community, Buddhist, Christian or whatever, you will probably find that daily study of some kind is part of the discipline of life, or, if you are a Benedictine, that in accordance with Rule 38, “Reading will always accompany the meals of the monks.” But leading a secular contemplative life comes with no such in-built reminders that practice shouldn’t take place in an intellectual vacuum.

I have found that regular reading from what is actually a fairly small list of contemplative writers has become an indispensable part of my own practice. Readers of this blog will likely know who they are already, but people like Toni Bernhard, Tara Brach, Pema Chödrön, Daishin Morgan, Larry Rosenberg, Alan Watts have become my companions on the way, and I keep returning to their books over and over again.

I’ve not yet made a time and a place in my day for this kind of regular reading, but it occurs to me that perhaps I should. It is too easy to get sidetracked into reading only more speculative or philosophical writings, and think that’s the same thing. It isn’t; and that’s just the point. Something in the heart – mine, anyway – gets dried out and brittle without the companionship of those who are also following the contemplative path.

A (very) short booklist:

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha

Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life

Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Eternal life?

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In Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life, Larry Rosenberg ends his chapter on choiceless awareness with a Q&A session. One of the questioners asks:

Q: Ideas and beliefs about rebirth are often mentioned in dharma books. I wonder if you could tell us whether you believe in rebirth.

A: If you are a person brought up in a culture that has believed in rebirth for thousands of years, such as in Tibet or Thailand, the answer is obvious. I’ve known wonderful Tibetan teachers who look at me with sympathy when I say I’m uncertain about rebirth. On the other hand, many professors in the sciences might look at you like you’re crazy if you even mention the subject. All I know is that I am open to the idea but honestly don’t know!

One of the reasons I no longer profess to be a Christian, and could never be a Buddhist in any formal sense, is just this question.

In Christian doctrine God is held to be eternal – though opinions vary as to whether this implies that he exists outside time altogether, or whether he exists simultaneously in all dimensions of time, past, present and future. To die as a Christian is to possess eternal life (John 10:27-28) through knowing God (John 17:3). The only way I could ever make sense of this was to think that the instant of death must somehow be atemporal, and that in that moment outside time one might meet God. I have never been able to make any sense of the idea of a portable plug-in soul that could somehow be translated to a land beyond the sky. Maybe I never was a “proper” Christian.

Similarly, any idea of rebirth runs into the same problem, only worse. Not only is there the question of what might constitute the soul to be reborn, and where it might be located, but Buddhism explicitly, and cogently, states that there is, in a living person, no permanent unchanging self or essence (anātman). So what is to be reborn?

The metaphysical mechanics of life after death don’t make any sense to me, however they are expressed. That there is life after death – that the human race will go on, and so will all the other forms of life – is undeniable; but my life after my death? I’m not sure that idea even makes sense.

Cause and effect is another matter, maybe. Things have consequences; they are themselves always consequences. There is no discernible beginning or end to this chain of causation (karma), short of cosmological speculations about the “beginnings” of time. I was born as a result of certain events in history – my mother and father met; they met because of their work during WWII; there was a war because of certain political, economic and military factors, and so on and so on, back into time – and there will be certain limited consequences of events in my own life that will outlive me. But this is not the same as me in some way continuing, or recurring into the future.

But things exist. They are. There is a ground of being – Istigkeit, Tao – from which, in which, all things arise.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

Tao Te Ching

Things go on. Where they come from, where they go – I’m not sure those are questions that mean anything in the context of being itself; hence the “nameless” in the Tao Te Ching.

All we can do, all we need to do, is sit still. Daishin Morgan:

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Cause and effect

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Things have consequences; they are themselves consequences. Sometimes it’s easy to forget this – sometimes things seem merely to be chance, or else they are the result of someone’s action, out of their – or God’s – “sovereign will”. But those ideas are never true. The “chance” occurrence had causes. The cliff fall came about because of heavy rain falling onto fissured and unstable ground – someone was injured because they hadn’t heard the Coastguard warnings, and were walking too close to the base of the cliffs…

Fate? Karma? The will of God? What do these things mean, except attempts to explain to ourselves how things beyond our control could happen to us, or to those we care about? Karma actually seems to me to come closest: the idea that cause and effect are ineluctable – what is sown will be reaped. Karma, though, is usually more naturally understood in its human, ethical dimension:

The Buddha defined karma as intention; whether the intention manifested itself in physical, vocal or mental form, it was the intention alone which had a moral character: good, bad or neutral […] The focus of interest shifted from physical action, involving people and objects in the real world, to psychological process.

Richard Gombrich, Buddhist Precept and Practice.

The Chinese concept of the Tao – “[t]he Tao can be roughly thought of as the ‘flow of the universe’, or as some essence or pattern behind the natural world that keeps the Universe balanced and ordered” (Wikipedia) – seems to me closer to the metaphysical implications. To harmonise one’s will with the Tao, to accept the way things come to be, is to cease to swim against the current, to follow “the watercourse way” (Watts).

The Stoics frequently talked about ‘living in agreement with nature’. This, in part, means that it is within our nature to be social, cooperative beings who want the best for others, and for people around us to thrive. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, said, ‘All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature.’

Bridgid Delaney, Reasons Not to Worry: How to be Stoic in chaotic times.

To live in harmony with nature in this sense requires a willing abdication of knowledge and willfulness. Alan Watts again:

[P]eople try to force issues only when not realizing that it can’t be done—that there is no way of deviating from the watercourse of nature. You may imagine that you are outside, or separate from, the Tao and thus able to follow it or not follow; but this very imagination is itself within the stream, for there is no way other than the Way. Willy-nilly, we are it and go with it. From a strictly logical point of view, this means nothing and gives us no information. Tao is just a name for whatever happens, or, as Lao-tzu put it, “The Tao principle is what happens of itself [tzu-jan].”

This is of course, as I suggested in a recent post here, very close to what has been called, in Christian contexts, “quietism” – which has widely been criticised as heretical, due to its rejection of doctrines around free will and supernatural determinism.

But (and I quoted her in the linked post) Jennifer Kavanagh explains:

Welcoming uncertainty, embracing it, does not mean commending ignorance or trying not to know; it’s not about the rejection of knowledge. It’s not about the negation of the intellect, but its enhancement. It is a recognition that cognitive thinking cannot reach everything, an understanding that the scientific and spiritual approaches are not incompatible, just different, complementary, dimensions. Not either/or but both/and.

The contemplative embracing of this principle is perhaps most clearly seen in the practice of shikantaza, just sitting, watching for the way to open:

Zazen or enlightenment is not about finding a particular state of mind, for all states of mind are fleeting and cannot be relied upon. When you know who is sitting, you know sitting Buddha. This expression is a bit strange; why not say sitting like a Buddha? I prefer to say sitting Buddha because there is nobody sitting like a Buddha; there is just sitting Buddha. That Buddha never stops sitting, but we must awaken to her presence–not that sitting Buddha is either male or female…

A theme I return to again and again is to just do the work that comes to you. Such an attitude is open-ended in the way that life itself is open. If you give yourself to the way, the way appears and that way is always changing.

Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha.

To awaken is to love

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To awaken is to love, and in that love the tiresome need to put up and defend our views and opinions dissolves, and right there is an insight into things that nothing else compares with. We have to discover through personal experience how that insight, our faith and our intelligence all interrelate. For me, words and the effort to give expression to the truth continue to be of profound necessity in training. To awaken and not give expression to that awakening would be a contradiction. The struggle to find the words and the struggle to find the form our lives must take are the same struggle. I find it important to recognize that the way we represent training and enlightenment to ourselves and to others is influenced by our own existential needs. Those needs can give rise to many mistakes, yet if we engage them intimately, they impart a resonance of authenticity. How we represent the truth to ourselves and to others needs to be examined with sympathy, care and intellectual rigour. To me, this is part of what it means to cleanse the heart.
Daishin Morgan, Buddha Recognizes Buddha

I have often wondered how my instinct to put things into words might fit with the journey of awakening. I have not often had the opportunity directly to teach what I have found, nor am I a member of any institution within which publishing might be a normal and indispensable part of my life and work. So I have drifted, I suppose, into blogging. Small though my audience might be – oddly enough, it was much larger when I was blogging in a Christian context – at least I am making some effort perhaps “to give expression to the truth”.

As I have found myself increasingly at variance with institutional religion, Christian, Buddhist or whatever, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society, so my naturally eremitical inclinations seem to have strengthened – dramatically so since the enforced isolation in which so many of us found ourselves during the earlier months of the recent pandemic. The opportunity for online fellowship and collegiality of one kind or another changes our expectations of community and communication almost daily.

Almost as an aside, I have to say how profoundly grateful I have been to Sam Harris’ Waking Up course, both as a tool for learning and exploration, and as a wholly open community of practice. I came to the course through reading Harris’ book Waking Up, having had no idea that such a thing existed, and discovered right from the introductory course that I had discovered exactly the non-religious, intellectually honest and ethically sound path I needed once I had laid down my Christian contemplative practice. Without some such place to hitch the wagon of my nascent practice of open awareness, I might have found it much more difficult to avoid losing the thread altogether, or else attaching myself to a some avowedly religious community merely in order to keep some structure in my spiritual life.

Harris’ approach, which can best be summed up in his own words (quoted here before), was exactly what I needed at that time:

Spirituality begins with a reverence for the ordinary that can lead us to insights and experiences that are anything but ordinary. And the conventional opposition between humility and hubris has no place here. Yes, the cosmos is vast and appears indifferent to our mortal schemes, but every present moment of consciousness is profound. In subjective terms, each of us is identical to the very principle that brings value to the universe. Experiencing this directly—not merely thinking about it—is the true beginning of spiritual life.
Sam Harris, Waking Up, p.206

The explorations I have chronicled here and in my other blogs will go on, of course – probably as long as I do – but at times it is hard to know quite what to write. Any attempt I make at direct description of spiritual experience is almost bound to descend into hyperbole or bathos, and to try and describe life in the light of awakening would probably end up more like poetry than anything else. Maybe the value of a blog like this then is merely to carry on trying to communicate a few insights from the path of practice itself: glimpses, perhaps, from some imagined railway.

Choiceless

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[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness. This is the meditation technique I’m going to cover because it best fits the theme of the book—awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.
Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up, Wisdom Publications 2013, p. 104

Gradually I am coming to realise that the phrase “choiceless awareness” is not just yet another technical term for one technique among the many kinds of Buddhist (and related!) meditation, but a vital descriptor of what actually happens when we sit in stillness. Choicelessness is the open and unreserved receiving of whatever arrives – be it bodily sensation, sound, thought, desire, emotion or whatever – as simply an arising within consciousness. It is the grounding of our own awareness in the ground of being itself. There is nothing else, nowhere to go, no thing to find.

[Doing zazen] leads you closer and closer to your true nature, the primordial mind that is one with reality. Zazen is to just be this mind, which we already are, without adding anything to it. It is to accept all that arises as appearances within the mind.
Daishin Morgan, Sitting Buddha, Throssel Hole Press 2014, loc. 330

Still watchful after all these years

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Christian contemplative life holds dear a sense of watchfulness: there are Psalms and other scriptures that speak of watchmen on the walls, watchmen who wait for the morning, and so on (Psalm 130:6; Isaiah 21:11; Ezekiel 3:17, among many others), and the concept has its place in most traditions of Christian contemplative practice. This is not quite the same thing as Buddhist concepts of attention or concentration – there is a sense of waiting alertness, of “keeping watch” that I don’t read in most Buddhist texts.

Watchfulness, too, brings with it a sense of stillness, of poised attentiveness that reminds me of the old Zen tradition of asking, “What is this?” As Daishin Morgan says, “To ask, ‘What is this?’ can also be expressed as ‘just look’.”

To be still is grace; and inside that gift is gratitude. True stillness is nothing less, really, than open awareness: a place into which come sense data, the movements of the mind, traces of feeling, memory. The mirror remains unclouded. Stillness allows that to be seen, opens to light.

I am, as an aside perhaps, profoundly grateful to the emerging secular dharma. The knowledge that there is a growing community of practice that does not depend upon religious traditions, or on the acceptance of either dogma or the teacher/disciple relationship (however open it may be to learning from whatever source proves nourishing) is something I missed in my early dharma investigations in the 1970s. Growing up as I did outside of formal religion has left me much more comfortable outside of its traditions, whether Christian or Buddhist. From here, where I am, I can simply ask the question “what is this?” without needing to look for an answer that fits.

Paying attention, keeping watch – the heart too is open in stillness, and that is a solitude, a place apart from which compassion can extend, for which I am increasingly grateful – more so as the long days of this springtime pass into early summer.

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice